"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."-- Douglas Adams

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

Primer (2004)

Note: This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

I like science-fiction stories because of the possibilities that they
open. This is especially true of time-travel movies. The problem with
time travel is that it can be very easy to lose the audience. Pile on
too much jargon and techno babble and you almost need a degree to follow
along. Make it too simple and people lose interest. I’m not saying it’s
impossible to write a good time travel story. It’s just that you have
to do it right.

Shane Carruth wrote, directed and starred in
Primer, which is a story about two guys that accidentally create a time
machine. They’re part of a group of four guys working out of a garage on
various projects. The project that they’re currently working on is an
alternate source of energy. They spend their days working at ‘regular’
jobs and evenings tinkering with stuff, hoping to make something that’s
marketable.

When an item placed in the chamber of the device
grows some sort of fungus, they realize something’s amiss. It isn’t
until one of them takes it to a lab that they realize that something’s
really amiss. There’s way more fungus on it than should have accumulated
in a short period of time. We’re talking several months’ worth in a few
minutes. It doesn’t take long for them to realize that they have a time
machine. If only they could make it bigger…

So, they make bigger
boxes and rent some storage space. The primary limitation on the time
machine is that it has to be on the entire time you’re in there. This
means that you can’t go back to a time before you last turned it on. Not
a big deal, since the two guys want to use the device to make money in
the stock market using the ultimate in insider information.

They
both agree to avoid themselves for fear of really screwing things up.
It’s bad enough just going back in time. They have no idea what would
happen if they met themselves. However, it is an interesting concept for
them to ponder. What would it be like to do something you’ve always
wanted to do, but were afraid to do? Could you, say, hit your boss, then
go back and tell yourself not to do it? They don’t do it literally,
but they do go back and try to change major events, such as a party
where someone gets shot.

Things get really strange when it’s
revealed that they have a fail-safe machine. One of the guys built a
machine that he just left running in another storage unit the whole
time. This way, they could go back and undo everything in case things
got botched beyond belief. This means that he thought of changing major
events the whole time. It’s basically an escape clause of sorts. That’s
where the movie got a little strange. They do go back in time to the
beginning. One wants to stop them from inventing the machine while the
other’s not so sure.

I don’t want to give away the ending, partly
because I don’t fully understand it. By the time the movie was over, so
much had happened that I couldn’t follow it all. The movie packed in a
lot of story for just 80 minutes. I think that’s where the movie fails.
It tries to tell a fairly complicated story in a short time frame. I was
paying attention to the movie and I am technically inclined, relatively
speaking. I still had a hard time making sense of the movie.

It’s
not that the movie tries to hit you over the head with the science or
math. It’s just that the two main characters go from trying to get
alternate energy to time travel. Then, they go from the stock market to
saving people. In the middle of the movie, they realize that someone
else has used the machine to go back in time, but they’re not sure what
the person has done nor do they really seem to do much about it. The
entire subplot takes up maybe a few minutes in the movie. I totally
didn’t get the ending at all.

Overall, I’d give the movie two
stars. It started out strong, but went way to weird, even for me. It has
a low-budget look. (This is probably do in part to the low budget.) It
also had a very strange feel to it. It wasn’t quite movie and it wasn’t
quite documentary or even mockumentary. It was definitely a different
look. Since I watched it on the IFC, I can’t really complain. It wasn’t
bad for something I didn’t pay for.